Is it true that the lost Roman army settled in China?
The idea that a lost Roman army settled in China is a popular legend but lacks historical evidence. This theory is often linked to the accounts of Roman soldiers who might have traveled east along the Silk Road, but there are no credible records to confirm that an entire Roman army ended up in China and settled there.
Some historians suggest that Roman contacts with the East were primarily through trade and diplomacy, rather than military expeditions. There are some accounts from Chinese historical texts, such as the "Records of the Grand Historian" (Shiji) and the "Book of Han," that mention the "Daqin" (often interpreted as the Roman Empire), but these references do not indicate the presence of a Roman army in China.
While there are intriguing stories and theories about interactions between the Roman Empire and ancient China, the notion of a lost Roman army settling in China remains more of a myth than a substantiated historical fact.
In the remote village of Liqian in China, you will come across people with long noses, fair hair, and green or blue eyes. They allegedly descended from an ancient group of Roman soldiers, a claim that has been hotly contested among academics.
Chinese Romans
The theory of the Liqian population descending from Roman soldiers was first put forward by Homer Dubs, a professor of Chinese history at Oxford University. He believes that the Roman soldiers settled in Liqian following a violent battle between the Roman army, led by Marcus Crassus, and the Parthians in 53 B.C.
“Thousands of Romans were slaughtered and Crassus himself was beheaded, but some legionaries were said to have escaped the fighting and marched east to elude the enemy. They supposedly fought as mercenaries in a war between the Huns and the Chinese in 36 B.C. — Chinese chroniclers refer to the capture of a ‘fish-scale formation’ of troops, a possible reference to the ‘tortoise’ phalanx formation perfected by Legionnaires. The wandering Roman soldiers are thought to have been released and to have settled on the steppes of western China,” according to The Telegraph.
Dubs became interested in the subject after discovering that Liqian translated to Rome in ancient Chinese. In 2005, scientists took DNA samples from 93 residents of the region. The results showed that some of them had as much as 56 percent Caucasian origins. A few years later, another DNA test was done. However, this time, the results came out negative.
“Liqians are closely related to Chinese populations, especially Han Chinese populations, whereas they greatly deviate from Central Asian and Western Eurasian populations… Overall, a Roman mercenary origin could not be accepted as true according to paternal genetic variation, and the current Liqian population is more likely to be a subgroup of the Chinese majority Han,” the report concludes.
The question remains - Why was the village called Liqian, which sounds like ‘legion’? It cannot be explained as simply a coincidence
However, historians concede that the theory lacks archaelogical evidence like Roman coins or weapons.
A recent discovery that may provide physical proof was a human skeleton in the area that was believed to belong to a European because of its 1.8m tall frame.
https://eaglevisiontimes.com/featured/the-mysterious-chinese-romans-of-liqian/
In all fairness, most likely.
There’s an ongoing theory that in 53 BC, after the Romans were defeated at the Battle of Carrhae, the Parthians took many of the surviving Romans prisoner and transferred them to their eastern border along the lands of the Kushan Empire.
How they ended up in China? Nobody knows but there’s a couple of ideas such as:
- After their capture, the Romans were forced into slavery. During the days of the Parthians, there were many slave-soldiers in their military, it’s possible after a brief stint in the army, they could have been sold or traded, forced to move east along the Silk Road towards China.
- If they didn’t end up in slavery, the Romans could have been forced or merely offered to serve in the armies of Parthia. After working as guards along the border, they might have been released and with their superior discipline and training learned within the Roman army, they might have banded together and contracted themselves out as mercenaries.
Either way, it was said that some of the Romans after Carrhae ended up in the Battle of Zhizhi (36 BC) in the Han-Xiongnu War, they fought for the side of the Xiongnu as mercenaries. A reported description says that these men fought with a “fish-scale formation”, possibly meaning the Testudo.
With a pure lack of surviving records and documentation, no known contact between the Romans and Chinese and the fact that every empire between the Han and the Romans want to keep those two powers from linking up, no one will ever know or confirm the existence of legionnaires being as far out as China.
It is possible though, even with the large distance between both empires, it is a sound idea that Roman Legionnaires have made it to China and since the Parthians had a better shot at contact with China and the Xiongnu, it is very much possible that the Romans could have found themselves in the east, especially with the Silk Road being an active trade route.
It’s sure fun to think about though, I’m a avid learner of both the Han Dynasty and Rome, two of some of the greatest empires in history and yet what could have happen if they actually had true, direct communication? I guess the Parthians didn’t want to find out.
no !
and its absurd fantasy , why they are claiming that because uyghurs have this :
according to this absurd fantasy this is because of roman legion,,,, who lost their way near iran and passed huge asian mountains and ended his journey in eastern tukestan …
meanwhile ,
what about those ?
you can find them from eastern turkestan to finland in north euroasian steps and they are finno uyghur ah no sorry ugrian !!!! .
of course irrelevant with romans .
No. Central Asians are Turkic people. According to DNA, ancient DNA test, forensic archeology, etc. the peoples who would become East Asians, and Native Americans, migrated east from what is now Kazakhstan and those who would become Europeans would migrate west from the steppes of Central Asia.
Of course, migrations can be complex, and likely some Celts migrated east or remained in parts of Central Asia, hence the naturally mummified bodies, and pieces of preserved tartan plaid clothing found in the Taklamakan Desert.
Finally, during Roman and Persian times, it is thought that there may have been some Roman Centurions, who were prisoners of war, enslaved, might have found their way, by human trafficking, eastward along the Silk Road into China as slaves.
Probably not.
The army of the triumvir Crassus was defeated at Carrhae in 53 BC and a substantial number of troops was captured, never to be heard from again in Rome. There’s a Chinese source written about 20 years later which mentions a battle between Persian and Chinese troops where the Persians make a formation using overlapping shields like, as the author describes it, scales of a fish. In the 1940s, a British Sinologist put forward the idea that the troops in question might be Roman survivors of Carrhae using a testudo formation, put to work as troops for the Persians, who didn’t want to waste perfectly good soldiers once they had them. There’s further speculation, based on some sparse local legends, that the town of Liquian in western China was founded by Romans who found themselves in the far east, which has led some to imagine that the Romans-turned-Persians lost that battle, were captured, and were themselves put to work by the Chinese. Liquian perhaps means “legion” or “Latin.”
But this is all little more than speculation based on the slightest of evidence. The one and only thing suggesting Roman-ness for those Persian soldiers is their overlapping shield formation, and the Romans aren’t the only ones to use such a formation. For their part, Liquian has nothing resembling classical Mediterranean architecture, no admixture of western languages to the local dialect, or any other such features, and genetic surveys suggest that they have no Mediterranean ancestry (there’s a substantial admixture of western Asian genes, but those aren’t remarkable in the region). The idea of Romans captured by Persians and then again by Chinese is an interesting story, but probably just that and not a real sequence of historical events.
No way to know for sure. If the story is correct, I guess the word might be ‘’bought’’ rather than caught as well. After battle of Carrhae (53 BC), Persian (Parthian) army got 5,000/10,000 Roman soldiers into captivity. It is possible that the story might be true. The story is known as the lost legions of Carrhae (Harran in modern Turkey)..
‘’ The Parthians had a standard practice of employing captured soldiers as border guards. By transferring the 10,000 legionaries to the eastern borders they prevented any realistic chance of escape for the Romans who likely would have simply accepted their new lot in life. Record of the soldiers vanish for about 17 years when the battle of Zhizhi was fought as a Chinese army under Chen Tang assaulted a border town known today as Taraz, located in Kazakhstan near the border of Kyrgyzstan. Chinese historians note that the defenders held their shields in a “fish scale” pattern. The fight for the town was intense but the Chinese prevailed. The Chinese, under the Han Dynasty at this point, were near the height of their power; this battle represented their greatest Westward expansion and their victory was achieved in part because many of the locals defected to the Chinese out of fear. ‘’ Source of the quoted paragraphs: Romans in China: The Lost Legions of Carrhae
‘’ The Chinese were so impressed by these foreign warriors that they put them into another border town, this time guarding the border between China and Tibet as Tibetan raids were not uncommon around this time. Anywhere from 100 to 1,000 or more soldiers established themselves in this town that was known by the Chinese as Liqian/Li-Jien, which is pronounced as “legion”. These men were known to use tools such as tree trunk counterweight construction devices, and to reinforce the area into a square fort, a common site in the Mediterranean but quite rare in Asia.
It seems these Romans lived peacefully in Liqian, and 2,000 years later we have DNA evidence that over 50% of the villagers in modern day Liqian have Caucasian ancestry including green and blue eyes, increased average height and other distinguishing characteristics such as distinctly Roman noses. ‘’ Source of the quoted paragraphs: Romans in China: The Lost Legions of Carrhae
Rome and China are two major civilizations that shaped the cultures within their sphere of influence. They are also cultures that appear to have been mostly isolated from each other. Source of the picture: The Lost Legion of Carrhae: Did a Roman Legion End Up in China? | Human, Roman legion, Blonde hair blue eyes
The Other Side of the Coin
However there is another face of the coin. The other side of coin makes more sense to me.
‘’ For years the residents of the remote north western Chinese village of Liqian have believed they were special. Many of the villagers have Western characteristics including green eyes and blonde hair leading some experts to suggest that they may be the descendants of a lost Roman legion that settled in the area.
Now DNA testing of the villagers has shown that almost two thirds of them are of Caucasian origin. The results lend weigh to the theory that the founding of Liqian may be linked to the legend of the missing army of Roman general Marcus Crassus.
In 53BC, after Crassus was defeated by the Parthians and beheaded near what is now Iran, stories persisted that 145 Romans were captured and wandered the region for years. …
But really, do we need the Roman hypothesis? Those big blonde Romans? Here’s one section of the piece: “Archaeologists discovered that one of the tombs was for someone who was around six foot tall.” Because of issues of nutrition the Roman soldiers were notoriously short relative to the Celts and Germans (who had more meat and milk in their diet). Perhaps they had the potential for greater height, which they realized in the nutritional surfeit of … China?
Anyway, there’s a straightforward explanation for the “Chinese Romans”: they’re out of the same population mix, roughly, as the Uyghurs.
Before the year 1000 AD much of what is today Xinjiang was dominated by peoples with a European physical appearance. Today we call them Tocharians, and they spoke a range of extinct Indo-European dialects. It seems likely that there was also an Iranian element. The archaeology is rather patchy. Though there were city-based Indo-Europeans, it is clear that some of them were nomadic, and were among the amorphous tribes that the ancient Chinese referred to as the “Rong and Di.” The Yuezhi and Wusun were two mobile groups who left China in the historical period and are recorded in the traditional annals.
Meanwhile, between 500 AD and 1000 AD the Indo-European substrate of the Tarim basin was absorbed by Turkic groups coming from Mongolia. They imposed their language on the older residents, but genetically assimilated them. The modern Uyghurs are a clear hybrid population. In the papers published on the Uyghurs they shake out as about a 50/50 West/East Eurasian mix.’’ Source of the quoted paragraphs: No Romans Needed to Explain Chinese Blondes
I had met with an Uyghur girl in Kazakhstan… She was one of the most good looking ones I have ever met. She looked typical brunette European. Therefore from my personal experience lost legions story might be just true or not :)… They might be Uyghurs or Tajiks as well… Who really knows? The problem is Europeans themselves migrated from lands close to China many thousands years ago… Therefore Persian language belongs to Indo-European language family.
The most famous photo in the world. Sharbat Gula, the Afghan Girl, at Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan Source of the picture: The story behind the world's most famous photograph
This is still the stuff of legends, dating back to archeological research in the 1950s.
According to legend, captured Roman legionary POWs from the disastrous battle of Carrhae against the Parthians were marched eastward where a number were sold as slave soldiers to a Central Asian nomadic chieftain in Sogdiana, named Chih Chih. Later on, Chih Chih allied with other Central Asian tribes in raids into the Chinese Han Dynasty dominated eastern Central Asia.
The Han emperor sent a punitive expedition into Central Asia. Chih Chih's tribal cavalry army suffered defeat on the battlefield from the Han Chinese and their allies and forced back upon their fortress base.
The legend includes observations that about 240, strange-looking infantry soldiers were guarding the fortress, wearing strange armor, holding odd large shields and standing in a formation with overlapping shields in what historians think the observer was describing an ancient Roman 'testudo', or tortoise shield formation.
Around 140 or so of these strange soldiers survived the battle. The Chinese settled them in and around Liquan, so goes the legend.
The legend does not specifically state the strange soldiers are Roman.
The legend remains just that, a legend.
Perhaps future archeology will unearth more historical evidence.
A quick Quora rule of thumb: if any question begins with “is it true”, then, no, it isn’t true.
No, Roman soldiers did not arrive in China.
The idea behind this is that survivors of Crassus’ doomed Parthian expedition were taken prisoner in Persia and ultimately used as slave labor or even as slave soldiers on the northeastern , Central Asia borders of the Persian empire, and that some of these were captured by Chinese armies and brought to China. The scenario isn’t wholly impossible, but there’s no real evidence for it.
The myth is that a group of Roman mercenaries, who may not have been Romans, but from one of their eastern provinces were captured during a Roman battle and then ended up fighting for the empire that captured them against the Chinese, where they were captured again and settled in Liqian in Gansu province in around 36 BC.
However, there is no archaeological or genetic evidence that this took place. Basically a research in the 1940s made a big leap from the story of captured soldiers being settled and stories of military formations used in that area, look at the fact that some people in that area have light skin and blue eyes (which is common in the Middle East and in Turkic nations even Hollywood movies never show this), and went “Oh they must have been Romans.”
Nice story….but.
Zhelaizhai received much attention from international media and researchers due to a hypothesis which states that its inhabitants may have descended from the Romans. The area of the former Liqian County is known for the distinctive physical appearance of its inhabitants. The population has higher frequencies of traits prevalent in Europe, such as aquiline noses, blonde or light-colored hair, blue or green eyes, and relatively fair skin tones. In the 1940s, Homer H. Dubs, a professor of Chinese history suggested that the people of Liqian were descended from Roman legionnaires taken prisoner at the Battle of Carrhae Several investigations of Dubs' theory have been conducted although results were inconclusive.
…Yes. But there were not lost. There was an army unit that continued to be on the losing side of the current war and were transferred to the victors and lost again. This happened four times finally resting in China.
The first loss was to the Parthians, then the Parthians lost to Samarkand, who lost to Bactrain, who lost to China. Apparently this did indeed happen and there are Chinese maps with a unique character that denotes this Roman Legion.
It might be so. There is a town in western China call Li-Jun I think. The tradition there is that they are descendants of Roman legions, probably survivors of Crassus’ legions that were moved there by some agreement/sale between the Persians end Chinese. Some of the locals have blue eyes. That’s about all that I know. I think that the Italians were glad to hear from them but I do not know if there has been a great deal of contact or any genetic testing.
We don’t know for certain that they did. However, there is reason to believe that captured Roman soldiers from defeats such as the Battle of Carrhae in 53bc may have been sold by the Parthian Empire as slaves and traded eastward. A persistent rumour suggests that large groups of these slaves were taken into ownership in China and used as foreign troops.
It seems implausible but then again there were remnant Empires formed by stragglers left over from Alexander the Great centuries before so it’s not impossible by any means.
Roman army settled in China? There was no china back than. During the Roman years, China didn’t exist. Word China came around thousand year ago. It was all divided small dynasties.
However there is another record about other East Dynasty, Goguri/Goguyeo in Roman book of Historiarum, Murice 582-602.
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